So what's the big deal on this weird disco picture, other than my typical weirdness? No postwork. None of the symbols or colorful doodlies were done after the render. It's all "real time" rendering with homemade stuff. I like to do it that way if I can, because my Photoshop postwork skills aren't anything to write home about. It looks better if you can do it all at the time you make the final render when you have my limited skill set. I finally figured out how to do alpha mats with transparency and transparency falloff and all that jazz, at least as well I have been aiming for. The bottom right corner shows an exploded view of the alpha mats so you can get an idea how this kind of thing is done if you haven't seen it before. They're nothing more than pictures on a flat plane (in this case, the High Res Square primitave prop that comes with Poser). Transparent sections are mapped out. I understood the basic idea, but I could never make it work until today. And that's because Jepe (who makes great stuff, by the way) released a free add-on at Poser Addicts to a product that will be coming out in a day or so. But the add-on already works great as a stand alone. It's a bunch of cool props that have transparent parts. I've used his "Jepe's Fire" for a while now. If you've bought that in the past, you've know what I was aiming for with this one. I got to examining it in the Material Room in Poser 7, and I thought it might be nice if I actually made a freebie for once, since I'm always using other people's stuff. I don't have enough experience to make much of anything yet. With that as my goal, I started looking into reproducing the transparent alpha prop idea without using any of Jepe's files - try and make something that anyone with an out-of-the-box version of Poser can do. The picture above is the end result. Basically you go into Photoshop, use your favorite brushes and make a picture, make another picture to tell Poser where the transparent parts of the first picture should be, and then assign those pictures to a prop in the Material Room. If there's a tutorial out there that shows how to do this, I haven't accidentally stumbled across it yet. There's got to be one, because it's really not that hard once you do it, and plenty of people have made great products using it. So I may look into making a PDF tutorial for Renderosity of how to make your own alpha mat props, if I can figure out the tutorial upload process here and it hasn't been done to death already.